Oh, why did it take this long for me to find this gem? I have been looking for a reliable online Malay dictionary for so long and it did not occur to me to type ‘kamus dewan’ in a Google search. That would have directly led me to the Karyanet site which hosts the online Kamus Dewan. Actually, I was trying to see if the word ‘koda’ in my ‘Koda.Karma‘ blog site name is a sanctioned Malay word. Apparently not, according to Kamus Dewan. In retrospect, ‘Kod.Karma’ would have sounded just as good. Oh, well.

Incidentally, Karyanet hosts more than just Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) online dictionaries. It is a place for budding writers to publish their original work. Maybe, I should sharpen my Malay writing skills and become a karyawan at Karyanet. I could get paid for doing that.

Karyanet and DBP should be lauded for making the Malay language more accessible. The online Kamus Dewan alone will get me coming back every so often. But the website is rather busy and the navigation is rather bad. It is easier to find the online Kamus Dewan from Google search than the Karyanet menu system! And the popup thanking me for using Karyanet which appears every time I right click on a link (actually not just links, everything) is extremely annoying. You see, I wanted to open the link on a different tab on my Firefox but Karyanet tried to prevent me from doing this. I ended up disabling “Disable or replace context menu” in my Firefox advanced Javascript preference.

Just put a word in the topmost text box (just above “Medan Carian”), pick “Kamus” under the “Kategori” group and then press the “Cari” button. It will try to match the word you’ve type against all DBP dictionaries (Malay-Malay, English-Malay, English-English, what have you).